Warm Homes Plan

Lord Grantchester Excerpts

Tuesday 27th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

I thank the noble Baroness for that contribution. The question of heat pumps and insulation is very clear: heat pumps do not work as well as they should if a property is poorly insulated, so increasing insulation hand in hand with heat pump installation is a very wise thing to do. However, among other things, the warm homes plan tries to take a measured view of where fabric improvements are perhaps necessary and needed, and where other forms of enhanced energy considerations could take their place. There are properties that are very difficult to insulate to the right standards but, with solar, batteries, heat pumps and such things, they can come up to the sort of standard you require. So this warm homes plan is a little more careful about the combination of various factors. Elements of the plan will involve fabric—probably about 700,000 homes will continue to get fabric uprating—but other factors will be coming into being.

I will be happy to write to the noble Baroness about the future homes plan and how that will work out. It is under way at the moment and will, among other things, ensure that new homes, when built, will be of a sufficient standard that they will not need fabric uprating for the future, because it will be in the definition of those new homes. That is going to be produced shortly and I will certainly inform the noble Baroness about its progress as soon as I can.

[Lord Grantchester (Lab)]

This is great news, my Lords. It would be good to be reassured that the warm homes agency will act as a one-stop shop to provide advice to consumers to help them navigate through the best options for their homes. The fuel poverty strategy rightly recognises the importance of using and sharing data to support more effective targeting and delivery of fuel poverty interventions, such as energy efficiency upgrades and installations of low-carbon technologies. Can the Minister outline how the Government intend to use anonymised and aggregated smart meter data to enable those interventions to reach those households in greatest need?

[Lord Whitehead (Lab)]

There is a large number of applications of anonymised and aggregated data from smart meters, assuming that you have enough smart meters installed in any one place to make the data meaningful. We still have some problems with that and the smart meter rollout but, in general, it can be used for a variety of applications. For example, the warm homes programme is looking to develop area-based applications wherever possible: having the data on where people in fuel poverty are and what areas have a concentration of such people gives you a very good chance of making sure that you can relate the investment that you are putting in with actually making a difference on fuel poverty. Previously, one of the problems with schemes was that we just did not know where those people were. Quite often, the schemes operated a scattergun approach that did not really hit the target as they should have done.